Just A Single Character Can Crash Any IPhone Or Mac.
Just A Single Character Can Crash Any IPhone Or Mac (Crash WhatsApp, IMessage, Facebook Messenger, Outlook For IOS, And Gmail In Any IOS)
When it comes to security of operating device apple reached to milestone, but you’ll be shocked to know that a simple character is enough to crash an iPhone, iPad or Mac.
Basically it is a character of Indian language (Telugu) character, which can crash most device running on latesiOS. Telugu language is a Dravidian language native to India which is spoken by about 70 million people (from about 5% of the Indian population therefore).
The device will be crashed if the above character received or pasted simply in text field. The affected applications are
- Gmail
- Outlook for iOS
- iMessage,
- Slack,
- Facebook Messenger,
- Safari and Messages for the macOS versions.
- Telegram and Skype users appear to be unaffected by the text bomb bug.
Yes, you can simply crash someone’s iPhone by simply sending above character. Once the receipient will receive the above character the application will be crashed or it can leads to crash Spring board also. To be more precise,
Springboard is the standard application that manages the iOS home screen.
If you’ve received the symbol to your WhatsApp then your app will be crashed automatically and it won’t stop here. It will continue to close each time you will try to launch app.
If your device tries to show the received message (Which contains the symbol) in notification then the entire Springboard will be crashed. In this case wait for springboard to restart automatically.
I’d suggest don’t force a reboot because that can cause a bootloop. bootloop means that a device cannot complete it’s boot sequence and thus that process keeps repeating itself automatically.
If you want to get rid out of this then ask someone else to send a message to the same app that is crashing due to that symbol. By this way you’ll see again a notification and you can delete the message which contains that symbol.
According to an Italian blog Mobiworld, “The bug does not afflict only iOS but any Apple product: even watchOS and macOScrashano desktop applications when they try to render the character in question. They personally tested with Note, Safari and the App Store on macOS and all these were closed immediately as soon as the symbol in question was pasted.”
Apple is now aware of this bug and planning to release a minor update of current versions of operating systems to fix the problem. However the beta version of iOS 11.3 is already immune.
